Xbox Games on Demand
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I have zero sympathy for retailers. As someone else pointed out above, they've been on borrowed time for a while now.

They've spent the last 20 years ripping off both consumers and game publishers with their second hand sales, and now, just like the music and movies industries, instead of investing in coming up with ways to work with this new way of buying products, they've decided to resort to bullying tactics.

Well, good riddance to them and all other retailers with such a narrow-minded approach.

However, I do worry about how I'm going to play all my downloaded games on the next Xbox/PS3/Wii. Will I be able to transfer or re-download them easily? Who can tell?

In most cases they'd have to have between 60%-75% off to even make them as cheap as their retail, new, counterparts. I'd like to think that they aren't selling well, as it's the only way developers/publishers/others will learn. But there are so many fucking morons on XBOX Live that I bet they've sold plenty.

I can imagine a few people (maybe a couple of thousand) buying one or maybe two, but I can't really see anyone buying any more than that, let alone use it as a source for their game buying habits.

I bought one game (VP:TiP), but unless the prices are drastically cut to or below retail levels (just not gonna happen for reasons outlined previously in the thread) then there is no way. Reason being is if it was a game I was genuinely interested in I'd have bought it on or near release (none of the GoD games are less than a year old).

GoD would be perfect for people buying games that they were never sure of and as such avoided in the first place, but £19.99 is just way too expensive to lure them to a purchase, it is in no way a substitute. Drop the prices by tenner, and it's falls perfectly into those kind of bargains you sometimes see occasionally on websites like Play where you are lured into trying something new just because it's cheap.

For those reasons, and also because I wouldn't want a precedent to be set for a download-only future, I really hope they aren't selling that well.

I only got my 360 recently and it's mostly getting used for multiplayer between me and my flatmate (Left 4 Dead, Lego Indiana Jones, Pro Evo) although I've been playing Dead Rising single player as well. It's a testament to how lazy we are there's always a shout of "shotgun not" when we want to change to a different game. Was looking forward to be being able to just download games like Gears of War, Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed etc so I don't have to get up from the sofa when I wanted to change the disk! But I can't justify £20 when I can get a physical copy of most of them for £10 with cashback from quidco. Lego Star Wars is the only one that's reasonable value, but I think I've had enough Lego for now with Indiana Jones.

Juninho wrote:
I'd be interested in downloading more Games on Demand, but as a 20gb HD owner I'm not able to. A 120gb costing £90 isn't helping MS fleece me for digital downloads - they need to sort that out.

GoD isn't going to be the cheapest nor the only way to buy games for some time. And £20.00 for games like Mass Effect which only released in 2008 for £40.00 isn't that bad. But at the end of the day Microsoft is preparing for the day when brand new released titles will be released same day on digital like PC games.

But if you want to see where most people are forking out money is in XBLA. If you think about games like Battlefield 1943 selling over a million @ £10 each that is very good profit. Also games like shadow complex. I think XBLA is becoming a backdoor for retail quality games to be released incrementally or with smaller episodes like Wallace & Grommit. We are buying games for cheeper but more often.

Digital Distribution is the future and that guy over there at GAME and their crowded store is the past.